Guild Wars 2

Yesterday we spent the best part of 3 hours capturing a tier 3 keep (fortified walls, waypoint and all the gate siege). The enemy did a very good job of defending with only a few players but eventually after bashing our heads against it repeatedly we managed to finally capture it. Meanwhile the rest of the map suffered as a result of our efforts on the keep. I still find it strange that for a tier 3 keep you get the same rewards as a paper keep.

I think the rewards for capturing more upgraded keeps and towers should be multiplied depending on how upgraded the fortification is. The rewards just seem poor for the effort of resetting a fully upgraded fortification.

Also another thing that could see some improvement are the rewards given for defending keeps and towers. There is very little incentive to building and manning siege once a keep is captured because the rewards are so much greater for capturing wooden keeps and towers and what ends up happening are evil things called karma trains :P Everything wooden just gets re-flipped over and over by 50+ players under commander tags and to be honest and speaking as a commander myself, it seems the only strategy to attract large groups of players to my tag by capturing everything wooden. The incentive for defending and upgrading a keep on an enemy border is low unless within a guild environment and then guild events only last 3-4 hours on average and the keep is lost once the guild raid finishes.

If you could triple the amount of loot, WXP and karma acquired by capturing a fully upgraded keep/tower than a keep/tower with no upgrades and also increase the amount of rewards given for building siege and fending off enemies based on how much you did within the keep while the keep was contested (amount of repair used for building siege/repairing/enemy players killed within the keep) then there would be more incentive for playing WvW as it was intended to be played, instead of WvW as it is now. Many people jump on a border and look for a commander that is flipping keeps/towers that are wooden and switching borders, waiting until they are taken by the enemy and switching back again. Like a champion karma train in PvE.

Increasing rewards for menial tasks and higher tier keeps and towers kills 2 birds with one stone. Increases incentive for trying harder in WvW and lowers incentive for karma trains meaning more people follow commanders who try harder for defending and keeping what they capture.